Two plays soaked in technological anxiety. "An Ark" resembles a webinar with a staring contest, one that no human can win. Before you enter "An Ark," a "mixed reality" performance at the Shed, you check your coat and, more oddly, your shoes. Inside, there are three concentric circles of chairs arranged on a red carpet and, overhead, a white globe resembling a hot-air balloon. A docent explained that, through my virtual-reality headset, I would see four more chairs--and, ideally, they shouldn't float.

Elon Musk's X is living up to its name. Shortly after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, in 2022, he claimed that "removing child exploitation is priority #1." It was certainly a noble goal--social-media sites had become havens for distributing abusive materials, including child pornography and revenge porn, and there was perhaps no major platform as openly hospitable to such content as Twitter. Unlike Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, which restricted nudity and pornographic videos, Twitter allowed users to post violent and "consensually produced adult content" to their feeds without consequence. Long before Musk's takeover, Twitter had positioned itself as anti-censorship, the "free-speech wing of the free-speech party," as Tony Wang, the general manager of Twitter in the U.K., once put it--less concerned with policing content than with providing a public square for users to express themselves freely.

Silicon Valley envisions artificial intelligence ushering in an era of economic plenty. But what if the benefits are largely confined to corporations and investors that own the technology itself? In early 2024, Anish Acharya, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a big venture-capital firm based in Menlo Park, posted an article online titled "How AI Will Usher in an Era of Abundance." Since then, and even before, various Silicon Valley types have been tossing the term around loosely. Last summer, Elon Musk even adopted the term "sustainable abundance" for a new Tesla mission statement.

In the age of A.I., we endlessly debate what consciousness looks like. Can a camera see things more clearly? Earlier that day, she'd been onstage at the conference I was attending and had been teased for a gesture that looked as though she were flipping off the audience. Now she was in the hotel lobby, in a black gown, holding court. She stepped in front of a bright-orange wall. I had brought an 85-mm. "What are your hopes for the future of humanity?" She wasn't keen to answer, but she responded to the camera.

This was supposed to be the year when autonomous agents took over everyday tasks. One year ago, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, made a bold prediction: "We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents'join the workforce' and materially change the output of companies." A couple of weeks later, the company's chief product officer, Kevin Weil, said at the World Economic Forum conference at Davos in January, "I think 2025 is the year that we go from ChatGPT being this super smart thing . . . to ChatGPT doing things in the real world for you." He gave examples of artificial intelligence filling out online forms and booking restaurant reservations. He later promised, "We're going to be able to do that, no question."

What Kind of New World Is Being Born? According to the Gospel of Luke, the Virgin Mary first learns that she'll soon give birth to Christ when she gets an unsolicited visit from an angel. Nice messenger service if you can get it. But before trusty Gabriel can dispense the good news upon which Christmas depends he has to calm the girl down. "Fear not," he says, and, in a way, this sombre reassurance is the Yuletide message in drastic miniature.

The rapid normalization of artificial intelligence is forcing a reckoning with how much of the future is being shaped by hype rather than utility. The writers Charles Duhigg, Cal Newport, and Anna Wiener join Tyler Foggatt for a conversation about artificial intelligence and the promises, myths, and anxieties surrounding it. The discussion was recorded before a live audience at The New Yorker Festival this fall. They explore the gap between Silicon Valley's sweeping claims and what generative A.I. can actually do today; how people are using the technology for work, creativity, and emotional support; and why the tech's most immediate political consequences may be the hardest to grapple with. " The Biggest Threat to the 2026 Economy Is Still Donald Trump," by John Cassidy What Can We Do Instead?," by Jay Caspian Kang When an Ivy League school turned against a student .

Many analysts are predicting an election-year upturn, but they aren't accounting for the President's ability to cause more chaos. In a primetime address from the Oval Office last week, Donald Trump said, "We are poised for an economic boom the likes of which the world has never seen." This was the sort of bloviating that has convinced many voters he's hopelessly out of touch, but it did raise the question of how the economy is likely to perform in 2026, a midterm-election year. Given the data fog that the government shutdown created, the old joke applies more than ever: it's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. But some things seem reasonably clear.

Is the Dictionary Done For? The print edition of Merriam-Webster was once a touchstone of authority and stability. Then the internet brought about a revolution. Wars over words are inevitably culture wars, and debates over the dictionary have raged for as long as it has existed. Once, every middle-class home had a piano and a dictionary. The purpose of the piano was to be able to listen to music before phonographs were available and affordable. Later on, it was to torture young persons by insisting that they learn to do something few people do well. The purpose of the dictionary was to settle intra-family disputes over the spelling of words like "camaraderie" and "sesquipedalian," or over the correct pronunciation of "puttee." This was the state of the world not that long ago. In the late nineteen-eighties, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary was on the best-seller list for a hundred and fifty-five consecutive weeks. Fifty-seven million copies were sold, a number believed to be second only, in this country, to sales of the Bible. There was good money in the word business.

Proven methods for teaching the readers who struggle most have been known for decades. Why do we often fail to use them? "There's a window of opportunity to intervene," Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist, said. "You don't want to let that go." In 2024, my niece Caroline received a Ph.D. in gravitational-wave physics. Her research interests include "the impact of model inaccuracies on biases in parameters recovered from gravitational wave data" and "Petrov type, principal null directions, and Killing tensors of slowly rotating black holes in quadratic gravity." I watched a little of her dissertation defense, on Zoom, and was lost as soon as she'd finished introducing herself. She and her husband now live in Italy, where she has a postdoctoral appointment. Caroline's academic achievements seem especially impressive if you know that until third grade she could barely read: to her, words on a page looked like a pulsing mass. She attended a private school in Connecticut, and there was a set time every day when students selected books to read on their own. "I can't remember how long that lasted, but it felt endless," she told me. She hid her disability by turning pages when her classmates did, and by volunteering to draw illustrations during group story-writing projects. One day, she told her grandmother that she could sound out individual letters but when she got to "the end of a row" she couldn't remember what had come before. A psychologist eventually identified her condition as dyslexia. Fluent readers sometimes think of dyslexia as a tendency to put letters in the wrong order or facing the wrong direction, but it's more complicated than that.